Catching up!

With so much going on the blogging has gotten behind! Imagine that!

Please keep our visa situation in prayer! The letter that Pastor Lupe sent to Mexico city was rejected for us and for Tom over some technicalities that Pastor did not include. So he’s sending it off again. The three of us will have to make a trip to Mazatlan in the next couple of weeks to get extensions on our tourist visas that all expire in early July. Rats! We were hoping and praying that we’d get the letters from Mexico city and just proceed with our regular visas, but I guess not.

We got invited to Juan Manuel’s 39th birthday and had a great time! They served a couple different salsa crudas and tacos carne asada, quesadillas and gorditas! All yummy. Plus the requisite cake. It was such a warm night that they moved the table out into the yard and we feasted there. Thunderheads had rolled in and were stuck against the Sierra Madre mountains and there was a ton of sheet lightning all around and through the clouds. It was a really spectacular light show!

The carne asada restaurant around the corner from us was just the best, but the owner fell on hard times somehow and the business was only open sporadically, and our friend Beatrice ended up losing her job there. For the last month or so it has been open occasionally, and we stopped in once for lunch and found the food had lost a lot of it’s quality and the portions had become quite skimpy, so we’ve skipped it since then. We just discovered that the wife of the owner of the car wash next door is now in charge and she’s cleaned the place thoroughly, bought new tables and chairs, loads of plants and has installed a sink where customers can wash up before eating. They have the original menu of yummy, tender carne asada. Plus, she hired Beatrice back! We visited with her today and she is thrilled to be back at work doing what she loves.

Just when I thought I had Mexican money down I got some odd change the other day, a $100 peso coin! Didn’t even know they existed. We have $1, $2, $5, $10 and $20 coins (plus a paper bill in a $20 just to confuse the issue!) and getting even a $20 peso coin is fairly rare around here. We see the little blue bills much more often. This new coin is the largest legal tender coin I’ve ever seen too…check it out!



Have I mentioned futbol? Oh, my goodness! I’ve never seen such wackiness regarding the World Cup before. From June 9 through July 9th there will be nearly 700 hours of coverage for free on our satellite. Futbol promotions are on every product sold in the grocery stores and three out of four commercials on TV are either promoting the futbol coverage or selling products related to futbol. Want a goooooooooooooooooooool ring tone for your phone? $13 pesos! Want photos of Mexico’s team for your phone/computer, not a problem. You can download them! There was even a Mexico futbol hacky sack packed in the cereal the team bought when they were here! One of the channels on our satellite is countering with ads proclaiming they are “Un Canal, Sin Mundial”, which is basically they are the one channel without World Cup! Every restaurant has at least one TV on site now, even if they never had one before, so folks won’t miss any of the futbol matches. And today Mexico advanced to the next stage, so the wackiness will continue I’m sure. And, yes, the US was there too, but they were dead last in their group, and needed a win and also to have a couple of other teams win and/or lose for them to advance. Didn’t happen, so they are headed home.

Ralph and I celebrated our 34th wedding anniversary quietly on Saturday while our team was here. While they were having lunch at the church in Ceuta we slipped away and had lunch out at Carrillo Brothers Comida China! Hard to believe we’ve been married that long.

The heat has moved up to the higher end of the 90s and with the humidity it’s been miserable trying to sleep at night, so we are now running the A/C every night while we sleep. What a blessing it is to have this! We still just keep the windows open and let the breeze blow all day and into the evening, but about 8:30 or 9:00, the windows close and the A/C comes on to begin to cool the house enough so we can sleep. We bought a curtain and put it up between the living room and kitchen to keep the cool air in the living room/bedroom side of the house. We don’t need to cool the kitchen and guest bedroom at this point!

With the heat and humidity we find it difficult to do the round trip walking to town every day, so we have opted to take the bus to town and then we walk around there and walk back home. Seems to be a good compromise. We are still getting out to practice our Spanish and visit with folks, run errands, etc., but aren’t killing ourselves in the heat!

The rains have finally begun, kind of half heartedly though. We had rain for about 20 minutes or so on Saturday night, and then Tuesday morning about 2:30 a.m. we had a huge lightning storm that caused us to lose power and then boom! The rains broke loose! Regular gully washer! We have three gutters without downspouts that empty from Diana’s patio to ours and water was just gushing from them waterfall style! Our patio had some limited flooding and Ralph swept as much of the water out as he could so I could finish catching up on the laundry. We bought some taller, bigger bricks to put the washer up on too in order to keep it out of the water that gathers in that corner! Looks like it could rain more today too…just threatening at this point, but you can almost feel it in the air.

We’ve had a total of five hours plus homework with our wonderful language tutor Ivonne! We were so blessed to find her, she really is a gift from God. She’s helped us make some connections in our language learning and we’ve made some leaps in conversations! We are thankful. We’ve stopped the lessons for now, will practice some more and get comfortable in our new stuff and then hopefully hire her again. We went over to her house for a visit yesterday afternoon and met her daughter who is off to Puebla at the end of July to begin four years of training as a chef! Ivonne will miss her terribly, but knows it’s what she wants and needs.

Ivonne sent us home with some mangos and with a couple of packets of milk gelatin and the recipe to whip it up. I’ve seen it served here, but have never tried it. She says it’s fabulous and that once we’ve had it, we’ll never go back to regular water gelatin! If we love it, we’ll have to let her know, because you can’t get it here, but if we want it she can get us some when she delivers her daughter at school in Puebla next month! How nice is that?

The Lumppios surprised us with fresh, hot, homemade cinnamon rolls for my birthday breakfast! Pretty impressive! They were a wonderful gift to receive. Thanks to them, and to everyone else who has sent their best wishes, e-mails and cards! 55! Can’t believe I’m 55!

We are so blessed each and every day and we thank God for that and for you!

Our first team visit!

What a whirlwind, what a blessing! We had our first team visit these last few days and it was a complete and total blessing for us and for the communities in which we serve. The team was lead by Kathy and Mike and included Josh, Julia, Michael, Lindsey, Brittany, Amber, Aaron, John and Nate. They are an awesome group of folks from Minnesota Valley Free Lutheran Church.



They had breakfast at our house each day and then closed the day either with dinner out or food ordered in at the Lumppios, followed by a time of Bible study and sharing. Their days here were completely jam packed!



Friday morning they were off to the neighborhoods in La Cruz to deliver invitations and tracts to the people they met. They were inviting people to the municipal plaza to see them perform a drama, a puppet show and sing hymns and choruses in Spanish.







Later in the day they got all set up in the plaza and started to draw a crowd almost immediately, Nate deftly prepared balloon critters that delighted kids and cops alike!







They did a fine job with their performance, which was followed by a salvation message delivered by Pastor Jose. It was all so well received and the crowd had grown so much by the end that they decided to run through the whole thing again!







At the very end they also offered free face painting to the kids and entertained them all by blowing bubbles while they were waiting in line, giving the rest of us more time to speak with as many people as we could. We also ended up attracting a local dance team that was getting ready to practice in the plaza, so we had a good crowd of teens! Nice cross-generational mix! The kids did such an awesome job and through both performances they attracted about 150 people! One of the kids was giving the bust of Miguel Hidalgo a bath while he waited for his family!



Saturday brought a repeat, as we canvassed the neighborhoods of Ceuta, inviting them to the church later in the day for the performances. The kids did a great job, adding crafts to the mix here as well as the balloon critters, face painting, bubbles and their fine performances. The salvation message was issued by Pastor Ismael. There were more than 60 children and more than a few adults and teens in attendance. It was an awesome time. Lidia was able to have an extended talk with some of the former youth group members and was encouraged by their response to her invitation to return to church. Please keep that in prayer!

Sunday, they attended and participated in church services here in La Cruz and in Ceuta, giving everyone more time to interact with people they’d met in the previous days. It was a completely blessed time.



And, no, we didn’t work them totally to death the whole time they were here! There was time for afternoon rest, shopping in our downtown and at the MZ. They explored the myriad of Mexican snack foods. The discovered the joy of agua frescas.



We even worked in a visit or two to Playa Ceuta!



They sampled some of the local cuisine at our favorite restaurants and had some meals with Pastor Jose and his wife and with the church in Ceuta.



We got them on the bus this morning for Mazatlan, where they will rejoin the rest of their team and minister there for a couple more days before returning home. We will miss them!! They were such a pleasure to host and a joy to be around. They worked together so beautifully even though it was the first mission trip for many of them.

They were a blessed break in our routines of learning language and culture too! They left us with many wonderful goodies from crafts to medicines to bibles, tracts, gospels of John and they also brought us chocolate chips, graham crackers and Jiffy corn muffin mixes! Woohoo! These are great folks that enriched our lives as we interacted with them. Their impact will be felt in our communities for a long time to come. Thank you MVFLC and thank you Jesus for sending these folks to La Cruz and Ceuta!

A pretty great week, praise the Lord!

Ralph is doing much better, still a little lack of energy, but I think we both feel that a bit more now with the weather so hot and muggy. Temps consistently in the low to mid 90s with humidity anywhere from 50% to 75%. I got all hot and sweaty just making breakfast this morning and I didn’t even cook, just bagels with cream cheese and mangoes!!

Pastor Jose is doing much better too, and we are thankful. His spirit and outlook has definitely improved!

We did have a tiny bit of rain on Wednesday last week, just enough to put the wipers on for a couple of minutes. It was funny though because we noticed later that you could see the little impact craters of each rain drop in the dirt. Thundershowers have been forecast for more than three weeks now, not one has materialized. The big thunderheads roll in, hang out for a while and roll right back out.

Our cop friend Juan Manuel finally sat down for 90 minutes of chat and Bible reading. Most of our conversations with him have been on the go, when we see him in town or as he passes by on his work shifts or on the way to the super or taking Cruz to and from her job at the MZ. They just live half a block from us. But the other night he stopped, parked and came in and sat down!! It was a blast. He was in the army for six years, then plain clothes investigator for the state police (FBI equivalent) in Culiacan for eight years, but he said there was just too much violence. And though being a cop here is still dangerous (drugs mostly) it is still “tranquillo” compared to Culiacan.



I struck up a conversation with Rosario as she was waiting for the bus in front of the house, she came over to admire our flowers and we just chatted away while she waited, finally Ralph came out to let us know that the bus wasn’t running that day. I hadn’t even noticed!! She would have had a long walk home, about 10 blocks in the blazing sun. Her son is our back window neighbor, but he was at work with his truck. So we said we’d give her a ride home. She was very surprised that we’d offer but took us up on it. She insisted that we come in and wanted to feed us tamales, but we’d already ordered tamales from Pastor Jose, so we just stayed and visited for a while. She has a beautiful house with gorgeous tiles, huge beautiful laquered wood furniture, etc., and she was so nice. She told us all about her family, total of 10 kids, all close by here. She has two conures (little parrots) and two dogs, one of them completely hairless! Had a great time with her, finally had to take off, but she sent us home with pepper plants from her garden! Then later in the evening Candy and I were out front chatting and this pickup comes around the corner and up the road with an arm sticking out of the window holding a bag…it was Rosario with a bag of mangos for us!!

In potting up the pepper plants for the garden I discovered where our homeless gecko had moved to…the pots stored under the stairs. When I picked them up I startled him and he jumped from the pots to my bare foot. He stopped, kinda trying to figure out what he landed on for a few seconds and then scooted under the water barrel. We had a gecko living in our circuit breaker box, but the workers made him leave when they put the new one in a couple of weeks back and the new box is closed rather than open like the old one, so he couldn’t get back into his house and had to find a new one.

And our house geckos have a baby. We discovered him in the kitchen last night. So tiny I could have mistaken him for a bug, but nope! Baby gecko!

Ralph went over to Judi’s for his haircut this morning and her mom and dad sent him home with a bag of mangoes…going to have to make some sorbet I think to preserve them all. Even I can’t eat that many mangos, as much as I love them. They are small mangos, they fit in the palm of your hand, super sweet too because they are ripened on the tree.

And Ralph got his little surround sound system hooked up this morning, we needed an adapter and cable that we couldn’t get here so we got them while we were in Mazatlan yesterday. Now we can compete with the neighbors, music-wise! We have about 50 channels of music on our satellite, so he’s presently got it on “Ultimate Oldies” and he and Pastor Jose were rockin’ out on the patio!

We hired a Spanish tutor to help us with the finer points of sentence structure, verbs, tenses. We’ve just had two hours with her so far and it’s already made a world of difference! She sweet and funny, and is a teacher at the Prepatory School, basically high school. She really is a gift from God for us.

We had our team meeting in Mazatlan yesterday, and at Mary Ann’s suggestion we BBQed at Bosque de Cuidad park. Huge park with very shady picnic areas with grills and loads of kids toys to keep the girls busy. Our meetings are now once a month and include worship and communion, much better format for us all I think. Here are some pictures from our lunch in the park.

Gracie J on the big slide:



Ralph trying to talk Gracie L into the big slide, she eventually went, but only if he went with her!



Darwin’s masterpiece:



Chowing down!



Gracie J taking it easy after a lot of playing:



Thanks for all your prayers and support…we are so thankful for you all!

Love and Blessings,

Ralph & Chris